One of
the thing that is not immediately visible, but you can guess it, is the
consumption model of Openstack. Openstack cloud deployment can be broadly
classified in two different category: Do it yourself ( DiY) , and
(semi) contracted out ( aka enterprise cloud).

DiY vs Enterprise cloud consumption model

My own
brew definition (partially adapted-stolen from some of Simon Wardley blog posts , check out his
great
blog ):

DiY : Complete redesign of
an infrastructure architecture, most of the time as close as possible
to a true public cloud architecture ( or exact copy in the case of public
cloud provider) and/or often to fit very specific needs. These solution aim to have the lowest
cost possible by reusing as much open source tools out there combine with custom solution.

Enterprise: "It's like cloud
but the virtual infrastructure has higher levels of resilience at a high
cost when compared to using cheap components in a distributed
fashion. The core reason behind Enterprise Cloud is often to avoid
any transitional costs of redesigning architecture i.e. it's principally
about reducing disruption risks (including previous investment and
political capital) by making the switch to a utility provider
relatively painless." I.e. they want to be able to run "legacy"
application alongside new one without having to throw away a lot of
their
existing investment ( HW - software - skillset - HR , etc.. ).
These
Enterprise cloud solution are sometimes delivered/consumed as
(heavily) custom packaged Openstack
solution from specific vendor : HP , mirantis, etc... These
solutions are slowly making their way within the heavily regulated
company segment ( compliance issues require on premise deployment).

DiY Openstack use internal resource and knowledge, in order to
minimize TCO and maximize ROI they heavily rely on open source solution and
adapt it to their need. This is why most of the time DiY are almost 100%
home-grown solution.

On
the
other hand the Enterprise ones tend to be hybrid where you have a mix of
opensource solution and "enterprise" solution. Sometimes this is also
sprinkled with a dose of consulting. End consumer of these cloud
are sometime not aware that the solution they are buying is based on
open stack (
ex: in PaaS – Managed services scenario). By example Swisscom cloud
managed services ( offer SAP -ERP - BW - etc..) relies on Piston cloud
who relies on Openstack.

Often some key aspect are being bought separately for
their
enterprise features ( or performance, support) by ex: -storage : coraid (pNFS) / inktank (CEPH) , and
networking : arista- .

Openstack user base is skewed:

Now, why the
distinction is relevant to Openstack statistics: Cost savings open technology , avoid vendor lock-in are the main drivers, this should be hinting which one of
the two is predominantly represented in the users surveyed => DiY.

As a
result, the stats are quite skewed toward home grown solution where most of the
cloud stack is build using open source solution almost exclusively. This is why
CEPH or Ubuntu and other open source solution heavily dominate the stats
but they do NOT dominate cloud spending ( this is reinforced
with
the fact that most of the surveyed user have a 1-50 nodes cloud ... ~60%
+ of
the overall and only 20% of the clouds are used for production purpose
). I would love to see a venn diagram of the different dimensions. If anybody has access to the raw survey data I would be happy to do the diagram for them

By example, for the cloud storage solution of some Openstack
enterprise deployment in companies I came across you would see all the usual
suspect (EMC - Netapp - HP, etc..). However, they would be sometime
relegated as secondary player role while a certain number of newcomers took the
front stage. This newcomers obviously leverage the emerging market stage /
first mover to grab market share : Inktank ( commercial CEPH version) , Coraid
( pNFS , popular as it allow a natural transition from classical NFS
setup ) , and finally the wild card : Intel who is trying to push its
Lustre solution ( from their whamcloud acquisition) into cloud storage . Note: I am not too aware
on how glusterFS is fairing..

Openstack , a complex and rapidly evolving environment:

As you
can see Openstack ecosystem is heavily dominated by company using the DiY
model. This is further fuelled by the current state of Openstack which is
more a toolkit that you need to (heavily) customize to build your own cloud compared
to the self-contained solution like cloudstack, eucalyptus, flexiant, etc.. It makes
me feel like openstack is the Debian equivalent for cloud.

However,
its adoption is growing heavily in the corporate world (and as a result
fragmentation risk too): Oracle has its own home-brew version (but does not contribute
back anything and is completely closed) , SAP is starting some effort, Intel
is a big proponent (see IDF 13), Big managed services player are using it as their basic
building block ( T-system, Swisscom ,
Huawei , IBM etc..) .

A tough ecosystem for startups and established company alike:

Complex Ecosystem,
fragmentation, heavy reliance on custom solution makes it tricky for company to position themselves within this environment. Too low and they might be completely ignored due to the heavy DiY proportion , leading to a long struggle ( or death) hoping that the crossing of the desert will come soon.Too high level and they end up fighting with a multitude of Openstack clone as well as with other cloud solution. There is no right decision there, maybe using a coherent layered approach across the openstack ecosystem would enable the creation of consistent revenue stream while limiting the race to the bottom competition ( competing on price). I probably will expand more on this concept in a follow up blog post.

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About Me

Provide advisory services via Blopeur Ltd.Use to work / do research for SAP and more specifically HANA enterprise Cloud. Also use to lead the (now retired by SAP) Open Source project: Hecatonchire - it aims to bring together the flexibility of virtualization, cloud and high
performance computing in order to break free of current cloud
limitations. Hecatonchire deliver a
framework of tools aiming to provide memory, I/O and CPU resource aggregation
capabilities to x86/Linux native application.